FAIRFAX, Calif. – Those in the electronic design automation (EDA) world know that to use the Open Source software they need on the UNIX systems they prefer, they have two options: write the source code binaries themselves, or opt for costly programming development - until now. ReyesSoft has just introduced its OpenEDA Toolkit 1.0, designed to bring the power of Open Source software to the EDA community.

With the OpenEDA Toolkit 1.0, ReyesSoft has ported the Internet's best EDA Open Source software to the most popular UNIX-based systems, including SOLARIS (SPARC and x86), Apple OS X 10.4 (PPC and Intel), HP-UX 11i, Cygwin for Microsoft Windows, and Linux.

So what does the OpenEDA Toolkit 1.0 offer? It's actually an impressive line-up: Alliance CAD, Icarus Verilog, FreeHDL, the gEDA suite, GTKWave, Gerbv, PCB, Electric, and NG-SPICE.

"ReyesSoft's OpenEDA Toolkit 1.0 is ideal for electrical engineering students, educational institutions, individuals, and small companies that need affordable EDA tools without the licensing, hardware restrictions, or per-seat pricing that many commercial software packages entail," explained ReyesSoft president Ed Immenschuh. "While many of these packages are available elsewhere on the Web, only ReyesSoft has ported them to the major UNIX-based operating systems."

When designing the OpenEDA Toolkit 1.0, ReyesSoft made sure to include tools that can be successfully used for both individual and complex commercial EDA designs. As a result, the suite gives users the flexibility to work alongside commercial applications and integrate their Verilog and VHDL designs at any time.

At an introductory rate of just $100 for the basic version, ReyesSoft's OpenEDA Toolkit 1.0 [1] is accessible to virtually anyone. For additional fees, the company also provides subscriptions and user support. And for every purchase of the OpenEDA Toolkit 1.0, ReyesSoft will donate 10% of the profits to Open Source developers and projects or to environmental organizations working to slow global warming.

"We are pleased to offer the EDA world an affordable way to use the top Open Source software on operating systems other than Linux," Immenschuh stated. "With OpenEDA Toolkit 1.0, ReyesSoft has taken the frustration and work out of porting Open Source programs to UNIX."

With Fedora 8, the Linux community was introduced to open source EDA with the Fabless Semiconductor Simulation Platform, also known as Fedora Electronic Laboratory. The FEL consists of open source software packages that enable all aspects of electronic design including analog simualtions.

"In the semiconductor industry, integrated circuits are realised in a foundry," says Chitlesh Goorah [2], FEL maintainer. "However the financial strength needed to invest in building such foundry is way beyond one's imagination." "Engineers are focusing on the design and outsourcing the actual manufacturing, by opting a fabless business model." "Nevertheless, the deployment of a complete VLSI simulation platform still remains a difficult and painful process for these microelectronic engineers."

The FEL packages contains tools such as:

• Mature tools for ASIC Design Flow processes:
  • Analog/Digital Simulation and Circuit Simulations
  • Hardware Development - Modeling, Designing, Simulation, Synthesis and Verification.
  • VLSI (layout, schematic, synthesis, Finite State Machines, checks...)
  • Embedded Systems Development.
• seven extra open source standard cell libraries supporting a feature size of 0.13μm
• extracted spice decks which are simulated with any spice simulators and
• interoperability between various packages in order to achieve different design flows

FEL is available as a LiveCD edition [3] and through the automated RPM package management to simplify the deployment of the platform. The Live image will also entail project implementation tracking capabilities tools, such as assigning tasks, resources and issues.